SAFETY FIRST

Come July 1, traffic fines will be doubled for the first 17 miles of Knik-Goose Bay Road.

It’s not going to be a work zone. Nor does the change have anything to do with construction season. It’s a permanent change — the state is designating that portion of the road a Traffic Safety Corridor.

The corridor runs from Mile 0.6 to Mile 17. The road has long been designated as among the top five most dangerous in the state. And to hear law enforcement and emergency responders tell it, the designation will be a welcome change.

Michael Keenan, deputy chief with the Central Mat-Su Fire Department, said the area has long been a breeding ground for messy car wrecks.

“The speed limit out there is 55 miles per hour and so they tend to be high speeds,” Keenan said. “We’ve had some pretty significant entrapment accidents out there.”

Asked whether the designation would help, he said, “I know it won’t hurt. Anytime they’re paying more attention to that type of stuff and bringing more attention to the public on it you would hope that it helps.”

On the police side of things, officials said getting the word out that the area is a problem is part of a larger battle to bring down wreck rates. The other pieces include upgrading intersections and doing other engineering work and actually getting out on the road and enforcing the laws.

The state already has two such corridors, one is the Seward Highway south of Anchorage, the other on the Parks Highway north of Wasilla. A fourth corridor on the Sterling Highway from Mile 83 to Mile 93 is set to roll out at the same time as the Knik-Goose Bay corridor.

“Nationally it has proven effective,” said trooper spokeswoman Megan Peters, adding that some communities in the country have seen the corridors do their job so well they were no longer needed.

“After a number of years, some of them have been decommissioned as traffic safety corridors.”

Even in Alaska, Peters said, it looks like the statistics might pan out to show the corridors already in place are effective.

“So far data collected since their commissioning (shows) traffic accidents involving fatalities and major injuries have been reduced,” she said. “It just hasn’t been enough time to show an actual trend.”

Sgt. Kelly Swihart with the Wasilla Police Department said he would tend to agree with Peters, at least with regards to the Parks Highway corridor.

“This is purely anecdotal, but it seems like the amount of crashes that have been happening on that section have decreased,” Swihart said.

The Knik-Goose Bay Road corridor runs quite a way through Wasilla police jurisdiction. Swihart said traffic in Wasilla seems to have slowed down. The Parks Highway is a better-designed road than it once was and congestion in the downtown area has increased. Both factors have brought speeds down.

“In the past 10 days we’ve had two five-car collisions at Parks (Highway) and Lucus (Road),” Swihart said Friday. “There’s been some good property damage but nobody’s been hurt.”

But Knik-Goose Bay Road stands out. Speeds don’t seem to have decreased much and accident rates have remained relatively steady. Swihart said the area is one the department has focused on. Just last year they ran a six-hour shift focusing just on the road as part of a multi-jurisdictional task force Swihart organized.

There’s no shortage of work for cops out there, he said. In six hours that October evening, officers made 161 stops, wrote 99 tickets, and jailed five motorists, one for DUI. A quarter of those tickets were for speeding, Swihart said.

“I think speed is a big deal,” he said, but also, “I think at times people can follow to closely. I think at times people are paying too much attention to cell phones.”

That one drunk driver Swihart mentioned got off lucky. First time offenders are fined $1,500. When the corridor is in effect, that becomes $3,000.

Greg Wood, Wasilla’s deputy police chief, said the designation is something Wasilla police have been pushing for.

He said he has no idea whether the doubled fines will change department revenue. He doesn’t know and he doesn’t care.

“It’s not about fines or revenue or anything like that. It’s about saving lives and reducing the number of injuries we get.”

When he looks at department expenditures, Wood said, he sees the breakdown this way: It takes an officer maybe eight minutes to write a ticket. It takes an officer multiple hours to investigate a car wreck involving injuries.

“I’m taking an officer off the road for a number of hours to do diagrams and conduct interviews and that type of stuff,” he said.

So if those eight minutes spent writing a ticket can save three man hours investigating an accident, Wood said, “I would much rather see an officer out there writing a ticket.”

And, anyway, his department has, he said, a 3-to-1 warning to ticket ratio.

“If we stop 400 people only 100 of them are getting tickets,” he said.

On the ticket revenue issue, Peters had much the same to say. She said troopers are working right now to get the word out so nobody’s surprised when the doubled fines go into effect.

“We don’t want it to be just, ‘Hey, gotcha, here’s your double fine,’” Peters said. “We’re trying to put it out there ahead of time so people are aware that these stretches of road are the place where we have had these horrendous collisions.”

With the two new corridors — the one in the Valley and the one on the Peninsula — the state will have addressed four out of the five most dangerous roads in the state. The fifth? The Palmer-Wasilla Highway.

According to the Alaska Highway Safety Office’s Web page, that highway is definitely on their radar. Maps of the corridors, including markers for where and when fatal accidents have occurred, are available at dot.state.ak.us/stwdplng/hwysafety/

Peters said the troopers also have the Palmer-Wasilla on their screens.

“They’re still looking at engineering aspects and other aspects, they’re still looking at whether a traffic safety corridor is the right way to go,” she said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.